CloudBees puts its PaaS anywhere

CloudBees’ Java-centric platform as a service can now run inside a customer’s data center, at a hosting provider or on the Amazon public cloud, or on some combination of the above.

Many companies would like to give their developers a PaaS option but are hesitant to go all-in with the public cloud. Just a few PaaSes, like VMware’s Cloud Foundry, offer that sort of hybrid cloud deployment choice.

Steve Harris, SVP of new products for the Woburn, Mass.-based company said flexible deployment is a major benefit for many companies that need to keep their options open. “Many enterprises have existing investments in infrastructure and local resources they need to take advantage of. They can also opportunistically put stuff on the public cloud,” he said.

CloudBees provides the company with what Harris called a fully serviced platform. “We deliver the platform as a service whether it runs on public cloud, datacenter or hosted data center — you do not install anything. We architected it in a way where you identify the resources in your data center or hosted provider but you use us to deploy and manage it,” he said.

CloudBees competes not only with other PaaSes, like Red Hat’s Java-focused OpenShift and the aforementioned Cloud Foundry, but also with traditional Java-based middleware from Oracle and other companies, Harris said.

The CloudBees AnyCloud PaaS is available in North America and Europe. The two-year-old company, backed by VCs Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, was founded by Sacha Labourey, former CTO of JBoss, which is now owned by Red Hat.

While most of the PaaS players continue their arms race by adding more language support, CloudBees is pushing cloud deployment options, which could make it a power in the still-vibrant Java development world.